it took me too long to finally read this fascinating novel set in 1940s Trinidad that traces class divides and generational trauma in a fascinating mystery story.

The cliche "Journey through the dark heart of ...." comes to mind so much when I think about this book. It's brutal, hard to read, and in my opinion, worth it. Well-done storytelling from a fantastic author.

Special thanks to Ecco Books and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

This book had lush details of Trinidad,this is a typical story of the haves and the have not and has to do with class, region, the caste system, it also has violence and is a saga of two families and was a compelling story.

I absolutely loved the folklore/storytelling aspect of it.

I feel like I'm going to come back to this book and realize I loved it more after digesting it. It reminded me a lot of a Trinidadian interpolation of the essence of The God of Small Things; the story is focused on the ways that what we want, have, don't have, end up with, shape us. I loved seeing Trinidadian things in print, and I am now deeply interested in reading more about Trinidad in this period. This was also such a good distillation of how the the legacy of indenture affects the descendants. Yes, it's closer to the end of indenture, but so little has changed and the disparity in quality of life between the village and the barracks is so obvious and heartbreaking. Truly an excellent work.

*Thanks to NetGalley and the Publisher for an eARC*

First, thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for an eArc in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This book was pretty on par with what I expected from the blurb. It was lush, well-written, full of rich details, and with characters you can connect with! The only big problem I really had was the intensity of the graphic violence; I needed a more comprehensive list of trigger warnings before going into it or requesting this one. I probably would have refrained. I don't regret reading it though because, as weird as this might be to say, there was a lot of love from the author in regards to the setting, the atmospheres (mostly), and the characters (mostly).

4/5

The title of Kevin Jared Hosein’s novel is derived from a mourning ritual in which rice balls are left out for the hungry dead while the living forgo all worldly pleasure. It’s a good fit for this beautiful yet unceasingly dismal portrait of mid-1940s Trinidad, in which abject poverty, colonialism, and recent war-time occupation have squeezed joy from the landscape and the people alike, leaving tragedy and loss as the most salient features of either.
Though the island does not gain independence until 1962, there is a decidedly post-colonial feel to the setting, which alternates between a wealthy estate and an impoverished sugarcane barrack, one of many which are “scattered like half-buried bones across the plain, strewn from their colonial corpse.” The barrack is a rat-infested, “place of lesser lives,” which hosts some thirteen characters between five rooms, half-separated by crumbling partitions. The ones we care about are Hans Saroop and his wife, Shweta, whose shared ambition is to get out of the barrack and buy a plot of land in nearby Bell Village. The Saroops have a son, Krishna, who is “frail but uncommonly precocious.” The wealthy estate is owned by an eccentric criminal whose sudden disappearance leaves his beautiful wife, Marlee, all alone on the estate, where Hans Saroop is her favorite of the day-laborers. When Marlee receives a ransom note and a mid-night scare, she offers Hans a pay-raise — large enough for a down payment on the empty plot — to serve as something of an overnight-guard, further blurring the line between the disparate worlds that Hans straddles.
Describing these worlds is perhaps Hosein’s greatest strength as a writer. There is a lush quality to this prose which brings the landscape to the forefront:
“Picture curry leaves springing into helices; mangroves cross-legged in the decanted swamp; bastions of sugarcane bowing and sprawled even and remote; the spoiled smell of sulphate of ammonia somewhere in there; pink hearts of caladium that beat and bounce between burnt thatches of bird cucumber — all lain like tufts and bristles and pelages upon the back of some buried colossus.”

Unexpected word choice, an encyclopedic knowledge of the local flora, and a good ear for classical rhetorical devices makes many of these passages a pleasure to read. The landscape takes on a character of its own, which is lovely to watch at first, but also has the unexpected consequence of making the human characters themselves feel sometimes small and inconsequential. Within a few chapters, it is clear that character development through character action is going to take a back seat to evocative landscapes, and that the conveyance of tone is going to be a job left to the natural phenomena and physical setting, which begin to insist so strongly on propagating the general sense of gloom that they are sapped of their power by their sheer volume and lack of subtlety, as in:
“The sun was going down faster than usual, evoking the brooding nature of the lonely road.”
A potentially redeeming feature in setting up the landscape as a mire and a “small lonely plot of land swathed in bushes” as the professed goal of the Saroops, is that the reader is bound to hope that the novel might offer some taming-of-tragedy catharsis when they finally buy the land and maybe cultivate a home there. Neither comes to pass, and the dream doesn’t so much explode as simply dies and drifts away.
This failing is somewhat representative of the novel’s largest shortcoming: nobody seems to want anything for any extended period of time, which goes hand in hand with the other major problem: nobody seems to maintain or exhibit their most central traits for any extended period of time, or exhibit these traits in any way that justifies Hosein’s insistence that they are these things.
For instance: we are told that Krishna Saroop is an “uncommonly precocious” child, but aside from having his “nose deep in old, crumpled magazines,” he never does anything even bordering on intelligent. We are told that his father, Hans, is renowned for being a uniquely honorable and selfless man, who sacrifices everything for family and slaves away in the hope of purchasing a plot of his own, but as soon as he is presented the opportunity of abandoning his wife and child for a romance with Marlee following the resolution of the ransom-note perpetrator, he does so without any real soul-wringing hesitancy or time for transitioning into this new role, and abandons the long-dreamed for plot as well. We are told that Marlee’s past has made her sympathetic, resourceful, intuitive and independent, but as soon as she realizes her domineering husband is probably not coming back, she seduces and takes in Hans, dresses him in her husband’s clothes, and then proceeds to be transformed in the course of a page into a sort of Marie Antoinette, who rides up on a horse in a fancy dress to a poor child’s village funeral, where “Her eyes were a broadsword slashing the throats of degenerates.” In this way, the characters behave something like the landscapes that Hosein is so adept at describing. They are beautifully rendered at first, and then acted upon, and then changed, but through no agency of their own.
The theme of escaping group-living in rural, mid-century Trinidad should be familiar to fans of V.S. Naipul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, whose title character is roughly contemporaneous with the timeline of Hungry Ghost (Biswas dies in middle-age in 1952); yet while poverty and injustice are giant obstacles that allow us to see the indefatigability of Mohun Biswas’s spirited need for independence and a house of his own, to Hosein’s protagonists, these things serve as muck and mire; characters are stuck in one place, and then they are stuck in another, but there are no traceable footsteps or ascribable paths of connection. The undefeatable human spirit of Naipul’s Mohun Biswas is defeated again and again in Hosein’s Hungry Ghosts, which is fine, but it is not fine that it never puts up anything resembling resistance. We never get a moment of potential frustrated by injustice and bureaucracy and impoverished circumstance that bursts out, as Biswas does: “Communism, like charity, should begin at home!” Instead, plot logic and character agency are in constant genuflection to tragedy and grief. Four dogs are killed off, in four different ways. The result is a feeling that the novel lacks control or balance and the narrative’s grim descriptions ultimately impede rather than immerse.
Gertrude Stein (or at least Kathy Bates’s portrayal of Stein in Woody Allen’s 2011 Midnight in Paris) says “the artist’s job is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” Hosein does a magnificent job painting a brutal image of a place and time inhospitable to human decency and hope, but the fight his characters throw against this circumstance is hardly more than feeble. We are given two endings, one for a set of rogue and orphan twins, who are more set pieces than characters, but give us the best chance for hope as they huddle together at the end and dream of “somewhere remote, behind God’s back, where they couldn’t be bothered. Where sins were easily forgiven. Where the past could be prologue. They weren’t sure yet if such a place existed. But reckoned when they found it, it would be waiting for them. When they got there, they would know.”
It’s a lovely final scene, but it rings less representative than the farewell given Hans: “Dismantled and discarded by all the lives he wanted to live, tried to live. Nowhere left to go now but down, down, downstream.”

I requested an ARC of this book because it came with high praise from Hilary Mantel. It's a stunning novel, set in Trinidad in the 1940s, featuring a wide cast of characters and poetic writing. There's a palpable sense of foreboding and unease hanging over the story. The reader has the sense that something momentous will happen, but what and to whom unfolds slowly. By the second half, the pace picks up, and the story becomes totally engrossing. I could see this being listed for the Booker Prize. Thank you to the publisher for the advance copy.

This sweeping saga of two families captured me from page one. This book explored so much- faith, class, generational trauma, but somehow managed to do it all with care and made it compelling. I loved the folklore/storytelling aspect throughout and found it all profound.

SCIENCE AND SYMBOLS: AN INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN JARED HOSEIN (Interview Published by The Rumpus)
BY MICHELLE AJODAH
February 15th, 2023
Learning about my own family’s history in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora has been a slow process, excavating one piece at a time. Author Kevin Jared Hosein’s latest book, Hungry Ghosts, is dedicated to “the ancestors and everything they grew.” The novel, set in Trinidad in the 1940’s, centers on the kinds of people in history whose stories only remain in fragments.

The novel begins with four boys sealing their bond in blood and milk, adopting the corbeau, or black vulture, as their mascot. The reader adopts this form in turn, bearing witness to the joys and misfortunes of the characters. The novel is a mystery that features a quasi-haunted house atop a hill full of eclectic oddities, prose to be savored, and deeply human characters.

Hosein has authored two other books that were published in the Caribbean. The Beast of Kukuyo is a young adult mystery, and The Repenters received the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. In addition to his work as a writer, Hosein is a science teacher living in Trinidad.

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to speak with Hosein over Zoom about his forthcoming novel, his research process, and how the people, flora, and fauna of Trinidad are part of its landscape.

***

The Rumpus: Within the first few pages of the novel the ghosts of indentured workers are mentioned, almost as if they’re part of the landscape. Do you differentiate between ghost stories and mysteries as a writer or a reader? How do you think about both of those modes of storytelling?

Kevin Jared Hosein: I spent the first few years of my life in a small rural village in central Trinidad, a very Hindu village. It’s where my grandparents live. We moved to another area when I was four or five, but every weekend we used to go visit there. So every time there’s an event, there would be this oral storytelling tradition. A lot of it would focus around what we in Trinidad would call jumbies, that’s kind of like ghosts and demons and so on. It would be spoken of as fact.

As you grow up it’d be like well, the lights came on for themselves, it’d have to be something. I don’t want to use the word superstition, but I would say a lot of it was born from where we had electricity fail in the village. Darkness breeds a kind of mystery.

Ghost stories would become mysteries. We thought of it as actual ghost stories, but we would treat it as, how could this have happened? So we would have to filter the words through that kind of lens, especially me coming from a more scientific background. That is not specific to the village that I grew up in, it’s actually culturally widespread in Trinidad. It’s endemic in many areas today. Even my own parents would say you need to do this because this goddess will visit, or if you go to a graveyard you have to walk back backwards to make sure that no ghosts follow you. It’s probably good that no robbers follow you in! But it would be treated as such.

The mystery [is] to decipher where those originated, where they would have passed down from. Because it might not have started in Trinidad, it might have started in part of Eastern Africa, or parts of Southern India where the ancestors would have come from. I would say that is the link between ghost stories and mysteries. It’s inherently linked to our history and culture.



Rumpus: You mentioned your scientific background. Do you feel like your experience in science and as a science teacher impacts the way you write?

Hosein: It does in a way. I didn’t have the opportunity to study literature, so when I came into secondary school, I went to an all-boy’s Catholic school. It has changed since then, but at the time, literature wasn’t a subject that would be offered to boys. They wanted them to do science or business. That opinion has changed, thankfully, since then. (I do think though if I did do it in that academic setting I probably would’ve decided against it so it’s probably for the best.)

In terms of the scientific background, I might go off on a little bit of a tangent here. That’s ok?

Rumpus: Yeah, go for it! Absolutely.

Hosein: Ok! So in the book all of the characters, almost all of them, speak in what we call Trinidadian Creole English, or at least what I would say is my written version of it. There wouldn’t be any two Caribbean or Trinidadian books that use Creole English the same way because we never learn how to write it. We would put it in text messages and, you know, maybe in emails or Facebook posts, or WhatsApp or whatever, right? But everyone kind of has their own version of it—how to spell it, how to word it—but all of us speak it almost the same way. I mean, you have different levels of it, but you would know a Trinidadian or a Guyanese if you were to meet them.

In school, especially primary school, it was kind of shunned to write like that, to speak like that. You had to speak the Queen’s English, or the King’s English I guess, now. So when it came to me actually writing in a Trinidadian Creole English, I did it very late in life. When I first started to write, when I was a teenager, I wrote [stories set] in America. I had only been to America two times, but I would set my stuff in America and England. Basically, what I saw in the media and on TV. I would write the Hollywood versions of those things. To write in Trinidadian Creole English, to write a story set in Trinidad, I felt like I had to explain everything. To explain our words, and birds, and plants and so on.

Coming back to my scientific background now, I’ve done some scientific writing throughout university. Scientific writing is very specific, and it’s often very descriptive, especially if you’re dealing with zoology and biology—what I study—or ecology. When I was researching and writing Hungry Ghosts, what I wanted to do was to show that everything that we in Trinidad consider educated language, like scientific writing or stuff that I might find in a psychological journal, or very literary poetic prose, I wanted to blend that with our Trinidadian Creole English to show that one is not less than the other. It has a place amongst all these other things; it can be studied and can be academic. I know some people read the book and felt like, oh there’s a lot of big words in here, there’s some scientific kind of esoteric language, but I did have a purpose for that. I wanted our words mixed with all that other type of language. I would say that is maybe how my scientific background helped.

Rumpus: That’s so interesting, because I noticed when I was reading that all of the Creole words—a lot of which I recognized, though some of them are slightly different than the words used in Guyana—are not italicized. Usually in English, copyeditors will encourage you to italicize any words that are non-standard English, and that can be a fluid list of words. It depends on who you’re talking to, and if the audience is expected to recognize those words. If I were to go to a bookstore and pick up a novel, I guarantee if the word croissant is in the book, it wouldn’t be italicized. I love that it’s just included, like “baigan” is written like any other word.

Hosein: No glossary or anything like that. [With] a lot of older Caribbean books, the publishers wanted them to have a glossary. But nobody brought up the possibility of it here.

Rumpus: We’ve talked a little bit about science, and you mentioned your education and oral storytelling. Are there other forms of storytelling outside of literature and science that had an impact on the way you think about story and about writing? Like moves, TV, music, video games, anything like that?

Hosein: Oh, yeah. I love movies. I’m not sure if this is true, but some people tell me I write cinematically. I just write it as I imagine it playing out in a scene, how scenes are set, and kind of paint an image in my head.

I like to listen to music when I write—typically video game soundtracks because they’re so atmospheric. I’ll just give an example: the Elder Scrolls Skyrim soundtrack, because a lot of the time you’re just wandering around in this big open world, so the music is not really specific to any setting, but it has this kind of long, ethereal, wandering kind of feel. So for this book, that was probably on constantly to kind of get those ideas flowing.

A movie I had in my head when I was writing it was Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, which is a poetic, esoteric kind of movie, but still about imagery. I was thinking about how he used the images to tell an otherwise basic story, but gave it extra dimensions.

Rumpus: In terms of history, what is it about this particular period in the 1940’s in Trinidad and Tobago’s history that felt like a really rich place to set a novel?

Hosein: That specific time was when we had two superpowers on the island. We had the British and we had the Americans. The Americans were there throughout World War II and they would’ve vacated I believe sometime in the late sixties or early seventies. It was interesting at a time when both of them were there, because how the locals would’ve seen the British were like these authority figures who were almost infallible. They were very stern, strict, and appeared to be well-dressed, respected officials. To make it in Trinidad you had to emulate that behavior and style of dress and so on.

When the Americans were here, it would’ve been the navy and this was because they thought Nazi boats were in the area so they set up a base there around the capital. They built a road that kind of cut across the country and the navy was allowed to use that road, so it wasn’t a civilian road. We could kind of say it divided a certain part of the country because you had a part that was around the Americans and the more urban areas, and they were a little more developed. And there are the more rural parts like where the barracks would have been. I did find that was an interesting setting, like an actual road dividing the two.

So when both of them were there, the Americans were actually very brash and loud, and kind of the opposite of what the British were. The locals used to see that, and some of them would start emulating that because it would be like, oh the British are not infallible because now we have some Americans bossing them around. It’s almost a kind of feel-good schadenfreude kind of feeling I think some of them had. The Americans also, I think, brought with them the notion of the dream, the American Dream. You could come here and you could build yourself up, you could do what you want. They were very carefree kind of people, they had radios with loud music and they used to play with the locals. You of course had, you know, the very bad ones, but overall they were kind of the opposite of the British because they were very jovial.

What I sought to do was to put characters between, to give them that notion of a dream. I like to say this is a novel about split-second decisions, because either you go for it or you sink into the water and be forgotten.

Rumpus: I wanted to talk a little bit about your research process for this book, especially in terms of researching history.

Hosein: I think in 2016 or 2017 or so, I used to do some work for the Commonwealth Foundation. They run the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. They have an online magazine called adda, they were just starting it, and they were commissioning pieces from former entrants, and they asked me to write something about Trinidad. There’s so much to write, but at the same time I didn’t know what to write.

I had a childhood memory of dressing up—we used to put on these monster masks and go around, kind of like Halloween, what we call J’ouvert. We would take these broomsticks and make noise, and then the neighborhood people would pay us to go away. Last time I played that I would have been eleven years old. Later on, I noticed that nobody used to do it again. The practice has altogether stopped, and it’s almost as if everybody forgot it, and I was like, is this like a Mandela effect? Am I misremembering this thing I did for like eight years? Now it’s as if people vaguely remember it, so I wanted to write about that, or at least start with that.

So I said I would ask my grandparents, or my grandfather—he’s the talkative one. He was like, well things start and then stop. That was his explanation. I wanted to seek into why it ended, and one of my aunts said, well, people just got too ashamed of sending their children out to collect a few cents. It was almost like begging in a way. I don’t know if that’s the reason, but the conversation actually led to something deeper where my grandfather was talking about his childhood, and I was kind of relating it to my own. Over a period of ten to fifteen years, some things change and some does remain in a time capsule.

That first interview with him, I just gathered a lot of information. There was a story that he told me that I found completely unbelievable. In the villages there used to be a lot of floods, so people would actually carry boats in the roads and carry children to school and so on. Of course, when you have a lot of floods, you would get a lot of potholes in the road. There was this British official’s wife, and she was walking through the village, and he said that she tripped and fell, and she landed face down in a puddle of mud. She had this white dress on, so it smeared. Everybody was just kind of silent, and nobody was sure whether to help or not, so then he said this little boy started to laugh. [The official’s wife] got furious and apparently said she would order that the village be torn down because of that.

Apparently it didn’t happen, but I thought something about it was unbelievable. At the time I had a friend who was a historian, and he had a couple of books in Trinidad. His name is Angelo Bissessarsingh, but he passed away a few years ago. He never heard anything like that before, but he was aware that there was an order that was declined by some high official to raze that village, but there was no reason why, really. There was a made-up reason where it was encroaching upon something. It didn’t go through in the end.

So, what I thought was interesting was that, of course, not everything would be archived, that the story actually happened. It was as if, that [story] would’ve been lost in time if my grandfather hadn’t told it. I didn’t actually write that in the article for Commonwealth, but it remained in my head. I thought that maybe one day I could write a book with that character in it, and the book actually started with that character. Just the notion of it, someone having that high amount of privilege and power back then—it’s not like it was the 1700’s or 1800’s. This was 1940-something.

In terms of the research, a lot of it was mainly talking to people, elders, trying to extract information from them. Just me with a notepad and pen, talking for hours. A lot of people don’t like to talk about it, and I was very fortunate to find a few villagers who were quite surprised that it actually turned into a book. I don’t know what they actually thought it was going to be.

Rumpus: While I was reading, animals felt ever-present in the story. They’re pets, they’re symbols of the natural world, sometimes they’re omens of danger or disaster. How did you think about their role in the world of the story as you were writing?

Hosein: In the unedited version, there was actually a part with a cat at the barrack. The cat got edited out, and only the dog remained. It became a bit redundant, so the cat had to go. In terms of the animals and the landscape and so on, a part of me wanted to be like, well, us Trinidadians are part of the landscape too. We are kind of animals brawling and conflicting with each other all the time.

The last chapter of the book is mainly focused around the plants and animals. The book starts off with it as well, and I wanted it to seem like the land is an absolute, it is an ultimate. It’s almost as if to give a broad feeling of the island where—how can I say this—the dream of the island, the life of the island will continue. There will be others to continue the process. It’s almost as if, life will carry on, it will get better, there will be hardships. And the animals are there as a sign of that in a way, that the natural state, despite all the turmoil and hardships the characters endure, will move on.

I do see animals personifying certain emotions or ideals. The key one being what we call the corbeau, which is a black vulture. Corbeau is a French word for raven, but we call it that. It’s not our real national bird, but in a way, it is the most talked about bird in Trinidad. There’s a lot of idioms surrounding the bird, and I guess there’s one I was thinking about. It’s kind of an elitist saying, that corbeau don’t eat sponge cake, which means that you could throw out maggots and rotting food, but if you throw cake for it, it might just leave it alone. It’s as if to say that it doesn’t know what luxury is. That was something I kept in mind because we have a lot of animal idioms here. But I was thinking of it like that, as if these characters were part of the natural landscape, just like any other animal or plant.

4.5 stars

I am grateful to Ecco for sending me an advanced copy of this book for review.

What a fantastic addition to the Caribbean/ West Indian literary cannon! This is my first time reading from this author and it will not be the last, because I was impressed by this book.

This book is a historical fiction set in an interesting period in the Caribbean. This is a time in Trinidad specifically following a history of British colonization and right after the American occupation of the country. Historical periods whose impacts are felt even today. The story mostly follows a boy who is truly a product of his environment and is populated by characters that serve as a representation of the country as a whole.

Funny enough this book reminded me of Sam Selvon's A Brighter Sun (another historical fiction from Trinidad which every West Indian student has had to read at some point). This comparison is only made because at the heart of this novel is a coming-of-age story about a character who is almost caged in by his circumstances. On the periphery, there are other POVs who offer different interpretations of the same circumstances, which allows the reader to paint a complete picture of the world these characters inhabit.

Many authors do not delve into too many social issues at once when writing a coming-of-age story, but in this book the author never shied away from that. This book gives a real, gritty, and tangible exposition of racism, classism, and misogyny as they existed in the aftermath of colonialism. We see how the young characters sway between feelings of utter hopelessness and fleeting moments of optimism, but we also see the adults and how they have come to accept their circumstances. This weaves a very realistic and sad tapestry of life for poor Trinidadians at that time. This is ultimately a sad story and manages to be emotionally taxing from beginning to end. This is not helped by the fact that the character perspectives that we follow for the majority of the story are children.

I think the book was well done and I recommend it to everyone. I especially recommend it to people who have any interest in Caribbean literature, or historical fiction from the diaspora.

Part historical fiction, part slow-burn thriller, Kevin Jared Hosein's Hungry Ghosts is immersive and beautifully written, gothic and lush. Set in 1940s Trinidad and Tobago, near the end of American occupation and British colonialism, Hungry Ghosts unfolds as two families collide-- the wealthy Changoors and the Saroops. Hansraj "Hans" Saroop, lives with his wife Sweta and son Krishna in the barracks, a multi-family dwelling with a shared latrine that is falling apart. Hans works as a farm laborer for the unstable and erratic Dalton Changoor, who lives with his wife, Marlee in a sprawling manor. At the outset of the novel, Dalton goes missing, leaving Marlee with no idea where he might be and only his three dogs to keep her company. When the dogs start turning up dead and Marlee begins receiving threatening notes, she offers Hans a handsome stipend to stay at the sprawling manor and serve as a watchman. Hans agrees, a decision that causes conflict with Sweta and Krishna and sets the stage for the plot that unfolds.

This book was great. Hosein created such complex, memorable characters and his writing was so beautiful in parts of this book that I was amazed he is a debut author. I got such a sense of place from his writing and was invested almost immediately, and although the plot unfolds slowly, it feels methodical-- and there is a sense of unease from the first page. I wasn't quite sure what had or would go wrong, but I knew immediately that something was going down, and I felt compelled to keep reading to find out what would happen. I also really loved how Hosein began each chapter focusing on a character's past to give us context for how they fit into the big picture of the story-- I thought it was really effective in creating those complex characters without bogging down the story.

I highly recommend this for lovers of historical fiction, but I also recommend it to anyone looking for a slow-burn mystery in a setting that we don't see as often (in historical fiction, especially). This was great, and I was glad I read it.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Hungry Ghosts, set in Trinidad of the 1940's, is composed of histories passed from one generation to the next, demonstrating the power of oral tradition. Kevin aren Hosein credits his elders with providing the raw material, with conversation delivered in the patois native to the island nation, and by setting it during wartime adds a lot of outside influence on the proceedings. By turns atmospheric, realistic and tragic, this is a novel to watch, to read with care, and to recommend to others.

Here's what I loved: Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein is an absolutely gorgeously written drama with subtly-drawn, rich, original characters. Such beautiful prose--poetry really--and infused with a fresh voice.

But here's what I didn't love: This book is heartbreaking. Everyone is in pain—even the poor animals (heads-up if you are sensitive to animal cruelty). I would have given it five stars if it hadn't been so sad. I knew early on what was going to happen and spent most of the book dreading it. Now, I know many people who are mesmerized by tragic stories. I'm just not one of them. I prefer hope, redemption, and, yes, happily-ever-afters. Call me an unsophisticated reader if you must. But give me a ray of sunshine along with the storm clouds.

The writing, though...genius!

In his new novel, Hungry Ghosts, Kevin Jared Hosein paints an intense, detailed picture of 1940s Trinidad characterized by deep socioeconomic and racial divisions rooted in island history.

Four poor teenage boys--two cousins and the twin sons of a man declared to have been a “crime against humanity”--have gone through a blood brother ritual. One of the twins has christened their union with the name of a vulture “hated by the world it will eventually eat.” Wealthy Dalton Changoor, whose money source remains a mystery to all, has vanished, leaving a note for his much younger wife Marlee to untie the dog. Alone at night in the big house, Marlee goes downstairs to investigate a noise. Finding the door ajar and a shoebox sitting on a nearby table, she downs a brandy to muster the courage to open the box. Inside, she finds a freshly killed rat and a note ordering the delivery of $3000 dollars to a designated site in the wee hours of Monday morning. The note threatens death if anyone is told.

Is the note nothing more than a boyhood prank? Is it intended for her absent husband Dalton? No one else knows he has vanished without a trace. Is it intended for Marlee? Might it be a ransom note for his return? She is in no hurry for the latter.

Weird things are happening. Brahma has drowned. Shiva has been poisoned. Only Vishnu remains, blind and of no help for protection. They are dogs rather than Hindu gods, by the way.
Marlee has an eye for one of the workers, Hansraj ”Hans” Saroop, the father of Krishna, the youngest of the new blood brothers, his only living child. With her middle-aged husband mysteriously gone, 22-year-old Marlee decides to promote Hans to security guard. As a married man with a wife and son who might not like his staying away all night at Marlee’s, he’s reluctant to accept her offer although the money is tempting.

Hosein builds suspense. His vivid descriptive language brings Trinidad’s landscape and complex society to life. He artfully fills in island history, local superstitions, and backstories that help readers understand his characters. What are hungry ghosts? Read the book to learn the answer.

Former YA writer Kevin Jared Hosein, a native Trinidadian, paints a horrifying picture of a social structure destined for conflict. Still in his thirties, Hosein is a writer to watch.

Thanks to NetGalley and Ecco/HarperCollins for an advance reader copy of this page turner.

4.5 rounded up to 5

Posted to Barnes and Noble

Wow. What a wonderful tale. I cried several times. These characters lived such a hard life. Even the privileged ones had horrible beginnings. The story ended on a very bleak note, but it was wonderful and heartbreaking to hear their stories. This is a wonderful new author that I plan to follow. This is not a happy, fun loving book at all, it's extremely dark and sad, but a wonderful read at that.

After I read the summary I was so excited to read this book but after I got three chapters and I was just exhausted. They had so many extra words end in one sentence she could get sent in 10 different directions iPhone the basic story a very interesting one but think the execution of the story just was way too much. I’m sure they have a few Dr. Ruth students that would enjoy this book in those who love looking up words in thesaurus but ask for me a simple reader and reviewer it was all too much. I did like the dialect that was indigenous to the area and how do you start with simple terms and explanations this would’ve been a great book because what I understood was very interesting but using words that only those who enjoyed dead languages and antique dictionaries should’ve been something the editor warned him about. I received this book from NetGalley and the publisher but I am leaving this review voluntarily please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

Woah. There's something so special about getting to see an author lovingly describe a place that is special to them, and the way Trinidad is written in this book is so atmospheric and beautiful that I could feel the author's love coming through in every sentence, despite the fact that this story took place during a difficult time in Trinidad's history. The writing is stunning and evocative and I just felt swept up in the setting for so much of this book, it was incredible.

The story was also so heartbreaking, it really took me deep into the inner lives of its characters and did a masterful job at not just placing these human lives in their historical context, but making the reader deeply feel every injustice they faced throughout the plot. This book broke my heart but it also made me so ANGRY on behalf of the characters.

This came only just short of being a 5-star read for me because there were times I felt I was getting more character study when I wanted plot development. But this was beautiful and brilliant and I'm so thankful to the author for taking me to a time and place and culture I've never experienced before.

I don't have words to describe what I felt reading it. It was painful, heartbreaking, and beautiful. This book will stay with me for a long time.

Overall: A tragic novel set in Trinidad in the 1940s, Hungry Ghosts introduces us to a small but complicated corner of the Caribbean. The reader meets the residents of a sugar cane barracks, once home to indentured servants on the nearby plantation but now home to entire impoverished families doing their best to get by. We meet Hansraj (Hans), his wife Shweta, and his adolescent son, Krishna, along with their neighbors, friends, and the people who live in the nearby village of Bell. When the owner of the plantation, Dalton Changoor, goes missing, his wife Marlee hires Hans to protect the property at night, which leads to a catastrophic sequence of events for the community. The book deals with economic injustice, racial, ethnic, and religious tensions (especially between Christians and Hindus), and the struggles of women, who had little opportunity to flourish independently in this time and place. Please be aware that there are graphic depictions of violence in this book (more info in the FYI section at the end).

Likes: these are memorable, individual characters with distinctive personalities and points of view. The elaborate descriptions of the settings bring them alive, whether the action is set in the dilapidated, overcrowded barracks, the eccentric spaces in the Changoor house, or the fields and rivers in between. The language is evocative and incorporates words and speech patterns from this time and place in a natural way. The author’s note describes his use of Trinidad’s oral tradition and stories from his own family in crafting this book, and there are lots of intimate, carefully observed details that evoke a time and place I haven’t often seen represented on the page.`

Dislikes: the disappearance of Dalton, the landowner, and the subsequent blackmail were not as mysterious or essential to the plot as I would have liked. I guessed the identity of the blackmailer almost immediately. And the language at times grew too florid for my taste, with sentences overloaded with multiple similes and metaphors. My larger dislike, however, had to do with the level of tragedy and violence in the book. Tragic incident piles atop tragic incident and the only thing that kept me from becoming inured to the intense sadness was the shock of the violence. The descriptions of horrific violent acts, especially violence against dogs, were so extreme and graphic that they diminished my ability to focus on the story.

FYI: Intense, graphic violence against adults, children, and animals. Murder. Death of an animal. Death of a child. Death of a parent. Sexual assault. Prostitution. Difficult pregnancy. Infidelity.

Hosein’s fictional universe is wonderfully sensorial. The narrative is unhurried but infused with a current of tension. His characters are patiently constructed with individuated emotional ranges. The face, body, voice—each character will use them in their own way to show their eccentricity, fear, superstitions, anger, joy, dignity, hopelessness. The mix of characters is artful from the eccentric and paranoid estate owner to the group of young boys who stumble through adolescence and steal your heart along the way.

The legacy of the despicable system of indentured servitude is humming through the architecture of the story. One of the families Hosein follows, Hans and Shweta Saroop and their son Krishna, lives in a sugarcane estate barrack, a corpse from Trinidad’s colonial past when East Indians arrived on its shore as indentured laborers. It is a dilapidated building with ten-by-ten-feet rooms separated by cracked wooden partitions that provide only the suggestion of privacy. No inside plumbing, no kitchen, metal roofs and wooden walls that leak. The Saroops and four other impoverished families live in this building, sharing the sting of racism where town folks package Hindus as cow god devil worshipers who can’t read or count. The Saroop’s destiny is linked to the shady estate owner, Dalton Shangoor and his wife Marlee, both unprincipled. It will be a treacherous association that Hosein will unflinchingly explore.

My gratitude goes to NetGalley and Ecco for providing this eARC.